Samsung Galaxy Note 2 – Cases with magnets are not good for your phablet

By Category: Samsung

Samsung Galaxy Note 2 – the biggest phone out there – is always a good candidate for a protective case. 

Note 2 at its 5.5 inch screen is huge and you want to protect it, but which case would you buy?
You can get few Samsung original flip cover cases, but the trendy ones are the leather ones.
The designers got very creative and trying to minimize the size of the buckle started to make covers using magnets…

Well, magnets and smartphones don’t mix to well.

If case designers had read the Note 2 spec they would have seen that the phone is packed with sensors: Accelerometer, RGB Light, Digital Compass, Proximity, Gyro, Barometer and an S-Pen.

 

So, let’s see how magnets messed up my Samsung Galaxy Note 2….in just few minutes. 

After only few minutes of having the phone in the cover case with magnetic buckles my Digital Compass started to complain: “Magnetic field strength outside of expected range. Move away from metal or magnets, or try calibrating your sensor.”
Even after I took the phone out of the case the Compass was still messed up – displaying a wrong North direction and complaining about excessive magnetic field strength.

 
 The other feature that didn’t work as per normal, once I put the phone in the magnetic case was the S-Pen.

 The part of the screen sitting on top of the magnet inserted at the back of the case was not reacting at the S-PEN and we couldn’t write anything in that area.

Once we took the phone out of the case the S-Pen worked perfectly anywhere on the screen. 


File:AMOLED en.svgBesides, all above, it is known that magnetic field can influence the electro-optical properties of OLED displays. This will cause a decrease in luminance of the area exposed to an external magnetic field due to resistance change of these areas – OMR – organic magnetoresistance effect.

 

Also we know that magnets are not good for any data storage device. Even if micro SD are considered not affected by weak magnets, in some cases we have seen that very strong magnets and especially electro-magnets could shorten the shelf live of the card and trigger data corruption.

As you can see -it’s much better to avoid magnets around your Samsung Galaxy Note 2 phablet.